Alleged Silk Road kingpin’s past revealed in forgotten video

If you want to get a sense of a guy who’s allegedly been running Silk Road, a site that’s become known as one of the largest online marketplaces of illegal goods, here’s your chance. A video has surfaced from the depths of YouTube, where he discusses life and early childhood with a good friend.

“The world is in flux for sure,” Ross William Ulbricht says at one point with a touch of nostalgia. The video is from 2012 so Silk Road was well underway as the eBay of Drugs, as many called it. “I’m fascinated to see how it all plays out in 20 years. I don’t think I’ll be around to see it.”

[NOTE: Since posting this the video has been removed from YouTube]

Federal law enforcement has taken over the underground website and arrested the 29-year-old Ulbricht — here in San Francisco — who prosecutors says will be charged with conspiracy to commit drug trafficking and money laundering, among other crimes. Known in the underground as “Dread Pirate Roberts” (DPR), Ulbricht is believed to have made over $80 million in commissions from brokering sales on the site.

They talk about how they used to steal food from the lunch room, occasionally ran with a “bad crowd” and the mysteries of sex, love and heartbreak. But most people have such laughable moments of misbehavior and exploration in their past. He does talk about taking psychedelics with a girlfriend for the first time — though he’s careful to point out the drug they took, AMT, was legal at the time.

Ulbrich seems to have strong opinions about “world views” but preferred to have his friend René Pinnell speak of his, rather than share his own. He certainly doesn’t come off as any kind of libertarian idealist, much less someone that could be accused of running perhaps the Internet’s largest black market. Frankly, you wouldn’t be able to pick him out from any startup-developer type here in San Francisco.

At the end Pinnell asks him what he’s going to do over the next five years. Ulbrich stumbles, stutters, laughs and then says he wants to start a family and make more friends. “I want to focus on being more connected to people.”

(And for what it’s worth, Silk Road ran on the “Deep Internet” — that which isn’t indexed by standard web crawlers, takes some know-how to access and is home to most of the illegal activity that takes place on the wires. The URL was https://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion.lu not SilkRoad.com, which is an HR consulting company likely not having a great public relations day.)